Hacktoberfest: Thank You
I have just completed the marathon of submitting Pull Request as a part of Hacktoberfest Challenge 2018. For those, who don't know what I am talking about. Hacktoberfest Challenge is an annual event organised by Digital Ocean where you are encouraged to submit at least 5 PR to any distributions hosted on GitHub. In return you get specially designed T-shirt deliver to you anywhere in the world for FREE. It was first started in the year 2014. How did I get started? I was introduced to the challenge first by one of the blogs by Neil Bowers in the year 2015. Ever since, I haven't missed once. I am really addicted to it, to say the least.
What is so special about this year? Well this year, I beat my personal best i.e. 45 Pull Request in the first year 2015. As challenge expects you to submit 5 Pull Request in the month of October, I managed to submit 5 Pull Request every day in the month. How did I
manage to do that? Well, honestly speaking, at the start the challenge, I received encouraging words from the "Who's Who" of the Perl Community. And that gave me the push and confidence to go for the kill. Earlier I used to depend on recently uploaded distributions, which was enough to do at the most 1 PR per day and no more. In order to get 5 PR per day, I decided to pick authors who has sizable distributions. However I didn't just pick random author, instead I picked the author I feel comfortable talking to. So with that in mind, I now had plenty to work around to get to 5 Pull Request per day. The key to decide on things that is likely to be approved quickly.
At the end I managed to submit 155 Pull Request at the rate of 5 per day. Of those 86 got accepted and merged i.e. 55% success rate. Am I happy with the acceptance rate? Well, honestly speaking, I was hoping to go over 100. A friend of mine on twitter was hoping
that I will cross the magic numbers. Unfortunately it didn't happen. She must have been disappointed with the final result. I have been bothering my friends on twitter with daily progress report. A friend of mine on LinkedIn sent me private message on LinkedIn
saying he has been following my regular updates on twitter and wished me good luck.
Once I am done with the challenge, I tweet about the final numbers. In response to that one of my friend joked that I should get one T-shirt for each day. I still remember when I submitted 45 Pull Request in the year 2015, I didn't know that I will ever go past this number. Following next 2 years, I could only manage to do submit 12 and 40 respectively. Now that I have gone over 150 that brings back the same old question, will I ever go past this number? It appears impossible as of now. I am trying regain the energy to continue submit Pull Request at my normal speed i.e. 1 Pull Request per day, which I have managed to do since the start of 2018.I am hoping to end the year without missing a single day. Fingers Crossed.
Last but not the least, I would like to thank each and everyone for supporting me and kind words through out the challenge.
CPAN Contributor. Co-editor of Perl Weekly newsletter. Run Perl Weekly Challenge @PerlWChallenge. Father of 3 angels. Indian by birth, British by choice.
As one of the many distributions that got your attention (more than once, I might add), I thank you. It feels good to have somebody else notice your imperfections, and offer up a solution, rather than simply being a critic (or worse, a silent critic).
Keep it up, please.
It is people like you that keeps me motivated all the time. Every now and then when I feel low, I get positive and encouraging response to my PR. Suddenly I am back in action like a little kid. So thank you for your support.
You kept me really busy in October. ;) Congratulations on this. One thing you could consider is fixing up the .travis.yml config files for various distributions. For example, many won't have added the latest version of Perl or may not have caching enabled, might not have sudo set to false etc. You could probably automate some of that and send hundreds of PRs! Just blasting the PRs might annoy a few people along the way, but if you check with authors first, I'm sure many would welcome it.